Hellenistic Period

Most Hellenized Jews were no doubt absorbed into the Christian communities. On the other hand, such historical catastrophes as the destruction of the Temple and the crushing of the various Jewish insurrections by the Romans may have brought about a spiritual withdrawal of the Jews from the circumambient Greco-Roman civilization, a stressing of their separateness. Moreover, as a result of these disasters the spiritual center of Jewry shifted to Iraq, a country that was part of the Persian Empire and less permeated by Greek culture than the regions belonging to the Imperium Romanum.

Some traces of a knowledge of popular, mainly Stoic, philosophy may be found in the Mishnah, a codification of the oral law composed in Palestine in the second century of the Christian era, and in the subsequent Talmudic literature set down in writing in Palestine and Iraq. On the whole, these...